1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information display control device and a program which are adapted to retrieve an illustrative sentence containing a specified retrieval word.
2. Description of the Related Art
An electronic dictionary is hitherto known which is a kind of information display control device and has a dictionary data base (DB). When a retrieval word is input, the electronic dictionary retrieves an entry word corresponding to the retrieval word from the dictionary DB and displays related information, such as the meaning of the retrieved entry word, illustrative sentences and idiomatic phrases using the entry word, pronunciation, explanation, etc. Also, an electronic dictionary is known which has a function of, when a word or a phrase contained in related information of a displayed entry word is specified, displaying information related to that word and phrase.
The electronic dictionary has a jump function. By using this function it becomes possible to specify a character string contained in explanatory information in, for example, a Japanese-language dictionary and display explanatory information of an entry word in the same Japanese-language dictionary or another dictionary, such as a Japanese-English dictionary or encyclopedia, using the character string as a retrieval word.
The jump function of the electronic dictionary is one which, when explanatory information corresponding to an entry word is being displayed, allows the user to specify a character string contained in the explanatory information and performs retrieval again using the specified character string as a retrieval word.
With the conventional electronic dictionaries, the following inconvenience is encountered in looking up the meaning of a word contained in an illustrative sentence displayed as the result of retrieval. That is, when the conventional jump function is performed on the word contained in the displayed illustrative sentence, explanatory information about the word is read from the dictionary DB and displayed from the beginning. For this reason, the user has to search the displayed explanatory information for the meaning of the word. This makes the electronic dictionaries difficult to handle.
In recent years, electronic dictionaries of the so-called full-content type have come into wide use which contain electronic versions of all paper-based dictionaries. With this type of dictionary, there is a large amount of explanatory information about one entry word and such explanatory information is displayed at a time. In order to search for desired explanatory information, therefore, it is required for the user to scroll through some pages. This is time-consuming.